Parents again need to study school report cards for themselves

Posted: Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Just days before the start of the new school year, most Clarke County parents received reassuring news this week about the quality of their children's public school.

Eighty percent of the district's schools - 16 out of 20 - met or exceeded the state's testing and attendance benchmarks for the last school year. Overall, this is an improvement for the district, which had just 68 percent of its schools meet minimum standards in the 2002-03 school year.

Four Clarke County schools - the two high schools, one middle school and one elementary school - failed to meet one or more of the state standards. Because this is the second year in a row of failing to make "adequate yearly progress" for two of the schools - Cedar Shoals High School and Coile Middle School - their students will be given the opportunity to transfer to another school which showed better results.

State law and the federal No Child Left Behind law require schools to meet minimum standards or show progress toward certain benchmarks every year. In Georgia, a school's performance is tracked using attendance records, graduation rates and students' scores on the Georgia High School Graduation tests and the state standardized Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests.

Schools and districts which fail to show sufficient progress for more than one year in a row are assigned to the "needs improvement" category and must offer students special services, such as tutoring, or allow them to transfer to another school with a better performance record. Persistent problems could force a school to undergo restructuring or a state takeover.

Here is a breakdown of the four schools cited by the state as being in the "needs improvement" category:

* Cedar Shoals High School didn't have enough of its African-American or economically disadvantaged students take the English and math graduation tests to meet the state's 95 percent participation requirement. It's worth noting the school did show across-the-board improvements in participation rates. What's more, the two groups which didn't meet the minimum rate fell short by just one percentage point.

Unfortunately, Cedar Shoals didn't have similar success in improving its graduation rate. Not only did the school fail to meet the state's 60 percent minimum requirement for the second year in a row, but its graduation numbers actually fell from 53 percent in the previous year to 49.4 percent last year. Parents, school officials and the entire community should be particularly concerned about the 32.1 percent graduation rate for the school's black students.

* Clarke Central High School is planning to appeal the state's decision to place it in the "needs improvement" category for having only 67 percent of its economically disadvantaged students pass the English graduation test on the first try last year. School officials maintain Clarke Central hasn't failed to make adequate yearly progress because it was cited the year before for having inadequate test participation, not passage rates.

Even if school officials win their appeal on Clarke Central's academic performance, there is little question the school continues to struggle with its graduation rate. In 2003, the school graduated 53.4 percent of its students. Last year, that rate fell to 51.4 percent. Although there weren't enough Hispanic seniors at Clarke Central for the state to measure their specific graduation rates last year, the result wasn't pretty. Just 23 percent - or 6 out of 26 -Hispanic students graduated this spring. This is less than half of the group's graduation rate from the year before.

* Coile Middle School didn't have enough of its students with disabilities pass the state's language arts or math standardized tests. What's more, this same category of students also failed to meet the state's attendance standard with 23 percent of the group missing more than 15 days of school last year. These two problems - absenteeism and subpar test results - are almost certainly related.

* Fourth Street Elementary School also didn't have enough of its students with disabilities pass the state's math standardized test. However, school officials are planning to appeal this issue because they say the number of its students in the disabilities category is less than what the state requires for specific monitoring.

This was the second year the state assessed school progress and publicized its findings in individual and district report cards. While the timeliness of these assessments has improved - last year they weren't released until after the school year began - parents still may find the report cards somewhat cumbersome. There is plenty of jargon and the layout can make the information confusing at times.

Nevertheless, we hope parents will take the time to look over the performance of their children's school and to study the strengths and weaknesses. Some areas labeled by the state as inadequate may not seem that bad. Other measures not cited may be cause for concern. That's why each parent needs to review the specific information and make his or her own judgements - regardless of whether their children's school is deemed failing.

Report cards for every school district and school in Georgia can be found on the state Department of Education Web site: www.doe.k12.ga.us.